新车间 [XinCheJian]

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I Love My Job!

Mitch started with a good slide. Loving your job is important!

Kevin Xie from Xilinx (University Program Greater China manager) came by to visit XinCheJian last Sunday as he’s very interested in helping Hackerspaces in China. He sees Hackerspaces like XinCheJian as a potential opportunity for students to apply the knowledge they gain in university in real devices while inspiring them to do cool stuff. Xilinx programmable logic devices is what is powering many industrial strength devices and an important building block in any larger project. Xilinx offer capabilities that complement micro-controllers very well when continuous signal processing is needed. This could offer us interesting alternatives to real-time sensors data processing and actuators control in a very compact package. ]]>

Mitch Altman, Inventor of the famous TV-B-Gone, a remote control keychain that turns off TVs in public places. He is co-founder of Noisebridge, a San Francisco hackerspace, creator of the Brain Machine project in MAKE Magazine, gives workshops around the world on how to solder and make cool things with microcontrollers, and is CEO of Cornfield Electronics. We’re very lucky to have Mitch visiting XinCheJian on April 17th and give a talk on Hacking Cool Things with Microcontrollers! Everyone can learn and have fun making cool things with electronics! Please register here for the event.

[email protected] Sending a post to our Mailing List : [email protected] Follow us on : Facebook, Weibo, Twitter, Douban ]]>

posted a detail article on hacking HaiPad m701!

The M701 in itself is an example of hacking in China: here, hacking hardware that wasn’t thought to be workable together to achieve something close to a device that is much more expensive is not called a hobby but a full-time job! Like many others, the extremely low-cost of this 7 inch tablet is made out of a even lower cost chipset, the Telechips 8902. The Telechips was originally designed to fit high end automotive applications, not do tablets or robotics. This chipset powers a variety of similar devices: Augen Gentouch, Coby Kyros, HSG X5A, Haipad M701, Dawa D7, SmartQ v5/v7, Coby Kyros MID7005/MID7015, Imito iM7, Smartbook Surfer (Pictures) “Shanzhai” integrators prefer to keep their supply chain discreetly low-profile as they consider it their “secret” sauce. This is because in Shenzhen, manufacturers are in a race to produce a whole bunch and sell them before the local competitors do the same, often advertising capabilities of the underlying chipset that are actually unavailable to the user since unsupported by the OS.

Mitch Altman, Inventor of the famous TV-B-Gone, a remote control keychain that turns off TVs in public places. He is co-founder of Noisebridge, a San Francisco hackerspace, creator of the Brain Machine project in MAKE Magazine, gives workshops around the world on how to solder and make cool things with microcontrollers, and is CEO of Cornfield Electronics. We’re very lucky to have Mitch visiting XinCheJian and give a talk on Hacking Cool Things with Microcontrollers! Everyone can learn and have fun making cool things with electronics! After the talk, there will be a workshop for interested people to experience fun making cool stuffs: The workshop is free, you only pay for the materials used for the project of your choice and you can bring it back home! ＊ TV-B-Gone (turn off TVs in public places!) Material cost：130rmb ＊ Brain Machine (Meditate, Hallucinate, and Trip Out!) Material cost：130rmb Please register here for the event.

XinCheJian, the first Hackerspace in China, is one of the 30 Hackerspaces across the globe that have been selected to participate in the Great Global Hackerspace Challenge (GGHC) competition. The objective of the competition is to create an electronics build that will make a real and positive difference in an educational establishment. The competition runs for six weeks, from Monday March 21^st to May 3rd2011. Projects are evaluated on the following: How reproducible is the final project? How easily can the parts be sourced in locations around the world? How low cost is the final output? How well are the plans documented? How relevant is the project to helping education today? How inventive and creative is the design and build of the project? The selection of our participation proposal includes a 5900 RMB (US$900) budget in electronic components (including the required microcontroller and portable power source) generously provided by element14.com. Every Hackerspace that completes their project will receive 10 soldering setups while the three semi-finalist Hackerspaces will each receive over 13000 RMB (US$2000) worth of electronic tools. The Hackerspace with the winning project gets a Tektronix MSO2024 oscilloscope worth over 36000 RMB (around US$5,600)! As an extra incentive, semi-finalists will be invited at the California Maker Faire 2011. To address the objectives of the competition, XinCheJian will focus on getting elementary school students acquainted with the intellectual processes of cooperative problem solving with out-of-the-box thinking. This will translate into an interactive and intelligent educational toy that stimulates students into a variety of challenging experiences. Want to join or help our team? Contact us at: [email protected]. To reach the competition organizers, contact [email protected]. You can also take a look at our Press release or the Participant information pack from Element-14.]]>

RoboPeak from Shanghai

We are so glad that RoboPeak, a robotic R&D team has agreed to be one of the speaking at our reopening event on March 26. We ran into this team founded in 2009 on Sina Weibo and are very impressed by what they are doing. We look forward to seeing their presentation.

Quoting from their web site:

RoboPeak is a research & development team in robotics platforms and applications, founded in 2009. Our team members are Software Engineers, Electronics Engineers and New Media Artists that all come from China. RoboPeak develops both software and hardware, which include personal robotic platforms, Robot Operating System and related devices. Our vision is to enrich people’s daily-life with the ever-changing development and innovation in robotic technologies.

From their blog, they are doing very impressive work with Arduino and Robotic. Here is a picture of their robot. Definitely check out the blog! Click on the image to read more about their works.

iPad controller